Friday, January 15, 2016

Staunton, January 15 -- In recent
days, Moscow has renewed its effort to promote the idea of “Russian-Ukrainian
brotherhood” and the notion that the two form a single nation, an effort that
has three goals, none of which have anything to do with promoting the genuine
restoration of ties between the two peoples.

Instead, this new push is intended
to prevent Russians from concluding that their own travails are the result of the
Kremlin’s policy in Ukraine, to win points with the West by putting out what to
many will seem an anodyne view and then having Ukrainians reject it, and to lay
the foundation for expanded Russian pressure on Ukraine to address Russian
concerns.

Ukrainians overwhelmingly have seen
through Moscow’s intentions and rejected this latest “friendship” offensive,
something that has prompted those Russians who have participated in it to
express their regrets and even anger about the Ukrainians’ failure to accept
their outstretched hands.

In a commentary on the Grani portal
today, RFE/RL commentator Vitaly Portnikov provides a compelling explanation of
why that is so and describes precisely what Russians would have to do if they
were ever to have any hope that their offer of friendship with Ukrainians would
be credible in the future (grani.ru/opinion/portnikov/m.247707.html).

Portnikov says he could deliver a
long lecture on history and point out that Russians should not accept the
notion that “three centuries of occupation will make the occupiers one people
with the occupied. And even centuries of relative equal existence,” he adds, “will
not do so either.”

“The English and the Scots are not
one people, true?” he asks rhetorically. And the Castilians and the Catalonians
are not either. And even the Russians and the Tatars” – and he asked “forgiveness”
for his “political incorrectness” – are not one people although you still live
together in one state.”

But arguing about history is never
all that useful, Portnikov says, and so he will explain why Ukrainians now view
Russians as they do by making reference to his own experience as a member of a
family who lost many of its older generation in the Holocaust and might be
expected to hate Germans but does not.

When he became an adult, Portnikov says,
he realized that “German Jews hardly felt themselves alien amon ghte Germans
and many of them, indeed, almost all, viewed themselves as Germans of the Jewish
faith. And I assure you that these people were less prepared to the wholesale
destruction of their compatriots than Ukrainians were to Russia’s attack on
them.”

The commentator says that he did not
come to terms with the Germans because of any collective repentance by them. In
general, he says, he doesn’t believe in such collective repentance and
especially repentance by those who have been defeated. Instead, he came to
terms with the Germans because of “one single man, Willy Brandt.”

When Brandt came to the memorial to the
Warsaw Ghetto uprising, he got down on his knees before these victims of the
Nazis; and the picture of him doing so, Portnikov says, has reconciled him with
the Germans.

“Brandt did not have any relation to
the crimes of Hitlerism. None at all. He left Germany immediately after Hitler
came to power. He struggled against Nazism all the years of its existence. He became
a Norwegian citizen and returned to his motherland in a Norwegian military
uniform,” Portnikov continues.

Consequently, “he could calmly and
even dispassionately look on a memorial to people with whose murder he had no
relation. More than that, he did everything he could that that would not occur …
But [Brandt] felt a responsibility because the more your noninvolvement, the
more your responsibility before the victims of the regime which exists in your
own country.”

“It isn’t important whether there is
one people or two; it isn’t important what Ukrainians say or write to you – you
can’t even imagine would Jews could have written to the federal chancellor of
Germany in 1970,” Portnikov say. What is important is that you have the desire
to “fall on your knees at the grave of every Ukrainian” who has died in this
conflict.

Only a desire is necessary. “Nothing
else.”Ukrainians don’t need anything
else from the Russians, and “this is the only thing which can perhaps something
decades from now reconcile us, your repentance and your understanding of our
pain.”

It is possible that Russians can’t
understand this and still view the war as something alien to them, especially
if they personally opposed it. But they must ultimately recognize that for
Ukrainians, this is their war, and they know who caused it and inflicted the
pain they feel so intensely now.

Those Russians who have supported
Ukraine at this difficult time do themselves honor “whatever [they] think about
one or two peoples. But please grow up. Learn at long last to take
responsibility for your own state, for its crimes and its mistakes. And
understand that the level of your responsibility is 100 percent greater than
that of the criminals and fools” who do not understand.

And there is an additional reason,
Portnikov says. “On this understanding depends not our future but your own.”